Got 29 States but a Fact Ain't One

On Tuesday PolitiFact published a rating on Martina Navratilova that caught the ire of liberal bloggers:

PolitiFact gave Navratilova the dreaded Half-True rating, and this upset Wonkette writer "DOKTOR ZOOM," who complained:

Politifact, which now apparently is fact-checking retired pro athletes, to contribute to serious political discourse, checked into Navratilova’s claim, determined that employers in 29 states can indeed fire people for being gay, and rated Navratilova’s statement as “half true,” because it turns out that there are a few exceptions.

It doesn't happen often, but we're inclined to agree with ZOOM on this one.  We think it's a legitimate gripe. Of course, that's probably because it's a gripe we've been making for years, but we won't hold it against the suddenly enlightened left for (probably temporarily) noticing how arbitrary PolitiFact's ratings system really is.

The Wonkette article highlights PolitiFact's lame logic:

But what are these exceptions? First off, the Politifrackers acknowledge that 21 states and the District of Columbia “explicitly prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation,” and that in the 29 states that do not have such laws,

“employees in these states who believe they are discriminated against would not have grounds to win a lawsuit alleging discrimination.”

OK, so Navratilova was right, and her statement is true, right? Well, no, you see, because what she said took a single sentence, and there are paragraph-length exceptions

The gist of it is that Navratilova is correct that in 29 states there is no statewide protection for gay and lesbian employees from being fired for their sexuality. PolitiFact knocks the tennis star down a few notches because, gee golly, some companies have policies against discrimination, and some employees are protected by federal statutes. That's a bogus argument, and it's not fact checking. The fact that some people in specific employment situations are protected does not negate the fact that other people are not protected.

Navratilova is right, and PolitiFact is playing its usual word games.  

Our regular readers might wonder why we chose to highlight this as an example of PolitiFact's liberal bias. Since we started this site we've acknowledged that PolitiFact's arbitrary standards will eventually harm both the left and the right. This rating doesn't change that. PolitiFact simply doesn't offer quality fact checking, and it will inevitably flub ratings both ways. As we've documented, PolitiFact's inadequacy overwhelmingly harms those on the right more often than those on the left. This rating provides an example of how flawed their system is.

Any reputation PolitiFact has as a dispassionate arbiter of facts is completely undeserved. For all the bluster, they're a run-of-the-mill commentary site. Wonkette is correct to point out the subjective nature of this rating, but it's nothing out of the ordinary for PolitiFact. Navratilova is simply collateral damage in PolitiFact's inept carpet bombing of reality.

Our purpose is to highlight PolitiFact's liberal bent. But PolitiFact puts out shoddy work and opinionated claptrap that often distorts the truth instead of clarifying it. Eventually both sides of the aisle will take a hit.

The reality is no one should trust them.


Bryan adds:

It's worth emphasizing just how normal it is for PolitiFact to rule "Half True" for a claim that is true.  As Rachel Maddow notes, facts are either true or false.  One look at PolitiFact's list of "Half-True" rulings shows a great set of recent examples like the one Maddow complained of, including specific ratings of Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Jeff Sessions.

Rubio said the Gang of Eight immigration bill isn't amnesty.  PolitiFact said that it depends on how one defines "amnesty."  Yet Rubio used the normal, commonly understood definition.  "Half True," said PolitiFact.  Maddow went ballistic.  Just kidding.  She was able to contain herself until the Navratilova rating served as the last straw.

Sessions said prosecutions for failing gun background checks were down every year under Obama.  It's true for every year for which records have been published, and PolitiFact claims to rule according to information available when a claim is made.  "Half True," said PolitiFact, reasoning that Sessions kind of implied a trend that continued through the current year, and we can't confirm that yet.  PolitiFact also reasoned (!) that since prosecutions were also low under Bush therefore prosecutions under Obama "didn't nosedive."  The left wing blogosphere yawned if it noticed at all, as if "Half True" is the best we should expect from those lyin' Republicans.


Edit 5/8/13: Originally this post inadvertently included a draft paragraph at the end that was not intended for publication. It has been removed-Jeff

Edit: 5/9/13: Added "We think" to third paragraph-Jeff

PFB Smackdown: Tommy Christopher and Maddow's abortion critique of Romney

We use the PFB Smackdown feature to critique the worst of the left's best critiques of PolitiFact.


Perhaps inspired by my assertion earlier this week that the criticism of PolitiFact from the political Left lack punch, Mediaite's Tommy Christopher jumps in the ring again, trying to float like Rachel Maddow and punch like, well, Rachel Maddow.

Christopher:

On Monday night’s The Rachel Maddow Show, host Rachel Maddow accused Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney of supporting a law that would outlaw abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, while also tying freshly-crowned VP nominee Rep. Paul  Ryan to extreme measures related to reproductive freedom. What’s curious is that Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact just got done incinerating President Obama‘s trousers over the same claim. Who’s right?

Good question.  Which one is right?

Politifact rated the claim “Pants on Fire,” based on the “logic” that some personhood amendments contain exceptions for rape and incest, and the life of the mother, and since Romney didn’t mention such exceptions when he expressed support for personhood, that must mean he supports such exceptions. It’s an idiotic bit of logic, like concluding that if I say I like Pepsi, I must really be saying I like Diet Pepsi.

Christopher is wrong about PolitiFact's logic.  Rather than using Romney's ambiguity to insist that Romney was specific about allowing for exceptions, PolitiFact criticized the Obama ad for assuming that Romney's ambiguity meant that he specifically favored no exceptions in his opposition to abortion.

PolitiFact:

(T)he Obama campaign has a problem in extrapolating Romney's position from that comment. Support for the amendment does not necessarily equate to opposing abortion when pregnancy is due to rape or incest.

So the Obama campaign, to use Christopher's illustration, was saying that if Romney says he likes Pepsi then he's really saying he likes Diet Pepsi.  PolitiFact and Christopher criticize forms of the same error, but PolitiFact does so accurately in this case.

Was the "Pants on Fire" rating harsh?  Sure.  As we argue, all of PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" ratings are ultimately subjective and amount to an opinion.  But the basic criticism of the Obama campaign ad was on target.

Weak attacks like Christopher's Maddowesque flailing don't amount to much, however.  If Christopher was interested in the truth of the matter we could expect to see him refrain from blatantly misrepresenting PolitiFact's logic.  Complaints like Christopher's tend to look like attempts to work the referee.

PFB Smackdown: Lawrence O'Donnell, Rachel Maddow and Tommy Christopher

Uh-oh!  Liberals are once again scandalized by a PolitiFact fact check!

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell appeared in the following political ad:




PolitiFact looked into O'Donnell's claim about critics calling the GI Bill "welfare" and ruled it "Mostly False."   The fact check does have some problems.

PolitiFact went easy on O'Donnell

The fact check contains a huge error.  PolitiFact overlooks the fact that O'Donnell is making an equivocal argument.  O'Donnell stresses that the GI Bill was an education program.  But when PolitiFact pressed MSNBC to support O'Donnell's claim, the latter responded by providing criticisms that almost exclusively aimed at unemployment benefits that were part of the bill.  O'Donnell's argument is a bait-and-switch.

PolitiFact claims to take such abuse of context into account.  Some of the "Truth-O-Meter" grades, in fact, carry clear signs of the perils of making a claim with limited context.

Rachel Maddow

PFB Smackdown: Rachel Maddow (Updated)

We agree with Rachel Maddow up through about the 55 second mark.  Yes, PolitiFact is bad, and PolitiFact is so bad at fact checking that it doesn't deserve frequent citations as a trustworthy source. 

After that, our level of agreement starts to drop.

Sen. Rubio (R-Fla.) stated that most Americans are conservative and went on to argue the point based on attitudes toward the labels "conservative" and "liberal."

Maddow ignores the context of Rubio's remarks and attacks it using survey data about the way Americans self-identify politically.

Maddow is supposed to be ultra smart.  So how come she can't figure out that Rubio's statement isn't properly measured against self-identification numbers?

It appears that Maddow uncritically followed PolitiFact's approach to judging Rubio's accuracy.  The self-identification numbers serve as interesting context, but it's perfectly possible for 100 percent of Americans to self-identify as "liberal" yet reasonably classify as majority conservative.  That's because people can have inaccurate perceptions of their location on the political spectrum.

So, was Rubio correct that the majority of Americans are conservative?  That depends on his argument.  Rubio didn't cite surveys about self-identification.  He used a method concerned with attitudes toward the respective labels.  One can argue with the method or the application of the method, but using an inappropriate benchmark doesn't cut it.

When you ask people which party they lean toward, the independents split up so that the country is almost evenly divided. For the year of 2011, Gallup reported that 45 percent of Americans identified as Republicans or leaned that way, while 45 percent identified as Democrats or leaned that way.

Is "Republican" the same label as "conservative"?  No, of course not.

PolitiFact came close to addressing Rubio's point by looking at the political leanings of moderates, but fell short by relying on the wrong label along with the self-identification standard.  Maddow's approach was even worse, as she took Rubio's comment out of context and apparently expected PolitiFact to do the same thing.

Meanwhile, PolitiFact defends itself with the usual banalities:

“Our goal at PolitiFact is to use the Truth-O-Meter to show the relative accuracy of a political claim,” Adair explained. “In this case, we rated it Mostly True because we felt that while the number was short of a majority, it was still a plurality. Forty percent of Americans consider themselves conservative, 35 percent moderate and 21 percent liberal. It wasn’t quite a majority, but was close.”

“We don’t expect our readers to agree with every ruling we make,” he continued.

Pretty weak, isn't it?


Update 2/19/2012:

With a hat tip to Kevin Drum of Mother Jones (liberal mag), we have survey data that help lend support to Marco Rubio (as well as to my argument in his defense):

(click image to enlarge)

1)  The survey, from Politico and George Washington University, is limited to likely voters.
2)  The poll essentially forces likely voters to choose between "liberal" and "conservative."
3)  A plurality of those surveyed (43 percent) lean Democrat or self-identify as Democrat.
4)  Despite the plurality of Democrats in the survey sample, 61 percent identify as conservative ("Very conservative" or "Somewhat conservative").

PFB Smackdown x2: Daily (Kos) double

Unfortunately it remains far easier to locate poor criticism of PolitiFact than it is to locate good criticism.

First up for PFB Smackdown, "Hunter" from the Daily Kos. Hunter thinks that PolitiFact blew its rating of Mitt Romney's claim that he never voted for a Democrat if a Republican was on the ballot.

Hunter:

(P)eople had a wee bit of a problem with this, because the context was Romney's vote for Democrat Paul Tsongas in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary. The Republicans certainly were having a primary that day as well: The incumbent president, George H.W. Bush, was running against Pat Buchanan. Now we can all look back now and have a good laugh at permanent cable news fixture Pat Buchanan taking on the incumbent president, but they both were certainly "on the ballot" in the 1992 primaries. So Mitt's completely making stuff up on this one—his critics have got him dead to rights.

One should not ignore the fact that the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries are two different elections.  There was no Republican on the ballot for the Democratic presidential primary.  Given the context, it is overpoweringly obvious that Romney was saying that he votes for Republicans whenever Republicans are on the ballot against Democrats, as with a general election.  The critics have to ignore one of the primary salient facts to have Romney "dead to rights."  We agree on the point that PolitiFact blew the rating, though for different reasons.  The context makes his statement true, assuming the Tsongas case is the worst would-be exception.

Next up, "dcg2," also writing for the Daily Kos, noticed a supposed trend with PolitiFact's front page material:

I took a quick look at Politifact's home page, and -- surprise, surprise... found two more quick examples of their front page of taking statements from Democrats that they admit are true, but calling them half-true anyway. Just a quick look at the Politifact's front page shows even more outrages -- all against Democrats ...

The author included no list of stories in his post, so it's hard to verify his claim to some extent, but it seems likely dcg2 was somehow able to ignore PolitiFact's flubs of Obama's milk regulations claim, Romney's voting claim and Mitch Daniels claim about the percentage of those under 30 years of age not going to work for the day ("Because many of them were in school"!).

PolitiFact announced in the summer of 2011 that it would start grading statistical statements in light of arguments regarding cause and effect.  Critics like these two Kossacks simply ignore relevant data.  And that makes for poor critiques.

Liberals late to the party on PolitiFact

As expected, PolitiFact's 2011 "Lie of the Year" selection did a good bit of damage to PolitiFact's reputation on the left.  President Obama's 2012 State of the Union speech produced a claim that again has some liberals crying foul.  The Daily Kos and the Huffington Post both published entries condemning PolitiFact's "Half True" ruling on Obama's claim that the private sector jobs increased by 3 million in 22 months.

Jared Bernstein:

I ask you, why do they go where they go? Because of this:

In his remarks, Obama described the damage to the economy, including losing millions of jobs "before our policies were in full effect." Then he describe [sic!] the subsequent job increases, essentially taking credit for the job growth. But labor economists tell us that no mayor or governor or president deserves all the claim or all the credit for changes in employment.

Really? That's it? That makes the fact not a fact? I've seen some very useful work by these folks, but between this and this, Politifact just can't be trusted. Full stop.

(what's with the exclamation point after the "sic," Bernstein?)

Was PolitiFact blatantly unfair to Obama?

Not necessarily. PolitiFact pledged in July of 2011 to take credit and blame more into account for statistical claims.  PolitiFact, in the segment Bernstein quoted, made a decent case that Obama was giving credit to his policies.

Fortunately for the crybabies of the left, PolitiFact promptly caved on this one, revising the ruling to "Mostly True."  The rationale for the change is weaker than the justification for the original ruling:

EDITOR’S NOTE: Our original Half True rating was based on an interpretation that Obama was crediting his policies for the jobs increase. But we've concluded that he was not making that linkage as strongly as we initially believed and have decided to change the ruling to Mostly True.

That editor's note doesn't give readers any concrete information at all justifying the new ruling.  It doesn't take Obama's phrasing into account in any new way, doesn't acknowledge any misinterpretation of Obama's words and doesn't reveal new information unavailable for the earlier ruling.  In short, it looks like a judgment call all the way, where PolitiFact arbitrarily (if we don't count the criticism from the left) decided to give Obama the benefit of the doubt.

The critics on the left, meanwhile, remain apparently oblivious to the another ruling from the State of the Union speech where Obama received an undeserved "True" rating. 

And where were they when Sarah Palin could have used their defense for her true claim about defense spending as a percentage of GDP?

We have a PFB research project planned to address this general issue of technically true claims.


Addendum:

PolitiFact editor Bill Adair has once again come forth to explain PolitiFact's ruling and change of mind:

Lou, deputy editor Martha Hamilton and I had several conversations about the rating. We wrestled with whether it deserved a Half True or a Mostly True and could not reach a conclusion. We decided that it would depend on how directly Obama linked the jobs numbers to his policies.

What criteria were used to determine how directly Obama linked the jobs numbers to his policies?

Adair:

Lou, Martha and I had another conversation about the rating and whether it should be Half or Mostly True. At various points, each of us switched between Half and Mostly True. Each of us felt it was right on the line between the two ratings (unfortunately, we do not have a rating for 5/8ths True!).

We brought another editor, deputy government & politics editor Aaron Sharockman, into the conversation and he too was on the fence. Finally, we decided on Half True because we thought Obama was implicitly crediting his own policies for the gains.

How was Obama's statement "right on the line"?  What criteria placed it there?  What criteria might have moved it one way or the other?

An item like this from Adair is precisely where we should expect a detailed explanation if there is any detailed explanation.

There's essentially nothing.

We get the report of disagreement and vacillation and none of the specific reasons in favor of one rating over the other, except for the implied admission that at least one person making the determination had a change of heart leading to a reversal of the rating.

If that sounds subjective on PolitiFact's part, it probably is.

Slate: "PolitiFact Weirdly Unable to Discuss Facts"

PolitiFact's recent spat with its liberal readership base has led to the publication of quite a few stories that echo criticisms recurrent in the posts we publish and link at PolitiFact Bias.

Slate's Dave Weigel, famously/formerly of the Journolist, has another such:

After this week, plenty of pundits are well and done with the national version of PolitiFact. The local versions? They're great. I was actually pretty fond of how one of them debunked an ad that misued [sic] one of my quotes, attributing it to a candidate, in 2010. Alas, PolitiFact Editor Bill Adair has committed the main site to a factually dubious "Lie of the Year" claim. PolitiFact claims that it's a "lie" to say that the Path to Prosperity ends Medicare. ActualFacts tell us that this is not a lie.

Adair responds to the critics in the worst possible way.

At a Republican campaign rally a few years ago, I asked one of the attendees how he got his news.

"I listen to Rush and read NewsMax," he said. "And to make sure I'm getting a balanced view, I watch Fox."

We're starting with an anoymous [sic] quote from a straw man that Adair met once?

Weigel continues to expand on Adair's defense, noting that it does nothing to address substantive criticisms.

Adair's response matches the customary pattern at PolitiFact, with the possible exception of the explanation PolitiFact offered after one of its criticisms of Rachel Maddow likewise offended liberal sensibilities.  The sad thing is that it took so long for so many liberals to see it.  Apparently it's easy to overlook the problem so long as conservatives have to deal with the bulk of the harm.

Though we hardly agree with Weigel about the quality of PolitiFact's state franchises (the jury's still out on most of them), his main point is well taken and the post is worth reading.

PolitiFact would gain credibility if it answered substantive criticisms with well-reasoned rebuttals. 

Claiming the critics suffer from some type of echo-chamber syndrome that prevents them from understanding PolitiFact's greatness is not a well reasoned rebuttal.  Rather, it is an ad hominem fallacy.  Readers are not well served with that type of response.

Jeff adds: Weigel continues with a curious new pattern we've noticed with liberal writers describing PolitiFact. What used to be a ubiquitary reference to PolitiFact's Pulitzer (which served to inform the reader of their unquestionable credibility and authority) is no longer worth the extra space to mention. 

Apoplectic Now: The Aneurysm of the Year

That massive popping sound you heard on Tuesday was the collective hearts and minds of liberals across America bursting as they witnessed their favorite source of smug validation betray them. PolitiFact editors played their pre-selected card and announced the Democrats' claim that Republicans voted to "end Medicare" as the Lie of the Year for 2011.

What could go wrong?

The wrath unleashed on PolitiFact went far and wide as hysterical condemnations and inordinate smiting piled up on the left side of the Internet. The High Priest of Haute Liberals himself, Paul Krugman, sounded the death knell in his subtly titled article "Politifact, R.I.P." in which he described PolitiFact as "useless and irrelevant." Talking Points Memo called the decision a "sham", and Steve Benen at Washington Monthly called the decision "indefensible" in his article "PolitiFact ought to be ashamed of itself." The list goes on and on and on (and on.).  The formerly ubiquitous mention of PolitiFact's Pulitzer that was previously announced as a badge of credibility is suspiciously absent in these articles.  

But for long-time PolitiFact critics like us, few things in life have been as entertaining as the epidemic hysteria witnessed over at PolitiFact's Facebook page. Check out this sample of outbursts posted on various Facebook threads throughout the week. (Names have been removed to protect the aggrieved):

"I've awarded Politifact the Steaming, Festering Turd of The Year Award for this one. Your credibility has been flushed."

"Politifact, you're either being bought off by the right wing echo machine or you're scared of them."

[The Pauline Kael Trophy goes to:] "This has been voted by everyone I know,including myself as the stinkiest,lamest,most cowardly decision of the year!"

"You let Fox News choose your Lie of the Year, didn't you."

"Embarrasing."

[This guy may be on to something:]"Maybe, we just gave a group of idiots too much credit to begin with simply because the bore the name 'Politifact.'"

"PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" is pretty good.......... for me to poop on."

"Noting your selective ignorance of objective facts, I am now forced to ignore you as a reference source. Unfortunate, but I am only interested in objective, FULL, analysis of facts." [Which is what I considered you when you were confirming my opinions.]

"So now we know Politifact is as bought as the politicians they scrutinize."

[Murderers!:] "Presumably, politifact also believes that if someone kills another person that it is not murder if they kill them slowly with a slow acting poison. Such lame and disreputable analysis and logic is incomprehensible for an organization wishing to claim some skill and reputation at factchecking."

[From the 'Paul Ryan stuffed the ballot box' conspiracy:] "The mere product of lobbying. Hey politifact way to bend over and take it. Hope you had on lipstick so atleast you looked good doing it."

[The Jews!:] "How many shekels did you guys get for that choice?"

"Did you guys get purchased by Newscorp?"

"Another election stolen. Dislike."

"What a bummer, I trusted Politifact implicitly until this." [Spencer Pratt responds]

[Baby, Don't Go Award:] "If you guys can do something to win back your credibility after this outrageous and outlandish ruling, then I may be back. Right now, though, I'm unliking this page and deleting the bookmarks I have to your website."

"Either you fire your editorial board and give yourself a pants on fire or just close up shop."


"God you guys are stupid."

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

PolitiFans fell into one of a few groups. Some accused PolitiFact of being a tool of the GOP.  Others claimed Paul Ryan sabotaged the vote by his email campaign (unaware that the readers poll is not the same as the editors' pick). Most simply said the claim was true, and that determining what constitutes the "end of Medicare" is an issue of semantics that falls outside the scope of objective values. That's a fair point, and it's one we've chronicled a number of times, including last years Lie of The Year. So where have all the indignant liberals been since PolitiFact's inception? Affixing varying degrees of "fact" to obvious hyperbole and opinion has been PolitiFact's shtick all along. For the left to become unhinged now betrays their own selective bias. In short: PolitiFact served its purpose as neutral, objective arbiters of fact, as long as they were validating liberal axioms.

To illustrate this point, check out this Jonathan Chait article (with some, uh, minor edits in bold):

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would very dramatically change health care.

...

Is that “a government takeover?” Well, it’s a matter of opinion. At some point, a change is dramatic enough that it is clearly a government takeover. If you proposed to replace a voluntary, free market system with a plan that mandated everyone purchase health insurance and the government dictated what patients and ailments insurance companies had to cover and what to charge, I would hope Politfact would concede that this would be “a government takeover,” even if you call the new mandates “a free market solution.” On the other hand, small tweaks could not accurately be called “a government takeover.” Between those two extremes, you have gray areas where you can’t really say with certainty whether a change is radical enough to constitute a takeover.


Does ObamaCare indeed establish a government takeover? I would argue no. But it’s obviously a question of interpretation, not fact. And the whole problem with Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” is that it doesn’t grasp this distinction. Politifact doesn’t even seem to understand the criteria for judging whether a claim is a question of opinion or a question of fact, let alone whether it is true.

Obviously, Chait's unedited piece argued that whether or not Ryan's plan did in fact end Medicare was a matter of interpretation (and ironically it mirrors the Wall Street Journal's op-ed about last years LOTY). We tend to agree with this criticism. And to be fair to Chait, he's called PolitiFact out for being harsh toward the GOP before. But the mountain of new criticism of the Lie of the Year, and PolitiFact's operation in general seems to be a few years late. Like all of PolitiFact's betrayed lovers this week, the reaction to the sudden realization that PolitiFact operates as a biased actor with motivations less noble than honest determination of facts is comical and disingenuous to everyone who's seen it for years. The irony for us is it took PolitiFact's calculated attempt to appear even-handed for the liberals to rise up in revolt.

The Medicare claim was the winner from the outset. Just take a look at its competitors. The reality is that Jon Kyl's abortion claim, Michelle Bachmann's vaccine statement, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz's rant about Jim Crow laws were hardly repeated outside of PolitiFact's circles. They were minor blurbs that barely lasted on the news cycles and had no place being in the running for statements "that played the biggest role in the national discourse." For all the gnashing of teeth about the winner, somehow PolitiFact managed to protect Team Democrat from any unflattering press about legitimate nationally popular issues like Solyndra or "Fast and Furious." The ten finalists were carefully selected, with an eye on the Medicare claim to be the winner. And anyone that thought they would select a GOP claim for the third year in a row ignored the reality that PolitiFact is a political animal with a brand to protect and an impartial image to uphold.

In the end it's hard to determine the final estimate of the damage PolitiFact has caused with its overwhelmingly liberal readership. We've seen smaller scale exodus whenever they've gone after Jon Stewart that had only short term effects. Whatever the case, conservatives would be wise to avoid finding anything redeeming in this temporary respite from the partisans at PolitiFact. As we've explained before, the shoddy standards PolitiFact employs will inevitably hit both sides of the aisle, but the liberal fishbowl of the newsroom will ultimately cause them to come down against the right much more often.

The 2011 Lie of the Year selection does little to diminish PolitiFact's aura of liberal bias. If anything, it exemplifies the selection bias and inherent flaws of their operation that have made it so unreliable in the first place. Whether this is PolitiFact's demise as a tool of liberal validation, or if it bolsters their claims that "upsetting both sides proves they're doing it right", for us at least, it's been a fun week to be watching.


Bryan adds:

Count me among those naive enough to believe that PolitiFact would pick three consecutive Republican claims as "Lie of the Year" depending on the material under consideration.

Jeff notes: I was correct in predicting the winner would go against the left, but my final pick (Obama hasn't raised taxes) was wrong. I suspect that had PolitiFact followed my advice there would be much less turmoil among the ranks. It's hard to imagine liberals being too upset about PF confirming Obama raised taxes.

Greetings frustrated liberals

Traffic stats here at PolitiFact Bias suggest that liberals outraged at PolitiFact's recent rating of Jon Stewart are ending up here as they search for confirmation of their suspicions regarding PolitiFact's conservative bias, or at least PolitiFact's pathetic attempts to attract a conservative audience by going harsh on Jon Stewart.

The bad news is that you won't find anything here that helps the case that PolitiFact exhibits any sort of anti-liberal bias.

The good news is that our associated blog, Sublime Bloviations, now features (if I do say so myself) the thus-far definitive analysis of the Stewart controversy.  Enjoy.